One of the primary concerns of software consumers, and in particular enterprise application customers, is patch management. In general terms, enterprise applications are applications used in a business environment, for which high availability and low maintenance are important goals. The maintenance of application software tends to be carried out by the application of numerous patch releases, each patch providing bug fixes, improvements in functionality, security enhancements and so on.
However, current methods of patching enterprise applications create many hours of downtime and there is no guarantee that the patched system will work correctly. Incorrect patches result in the application having to be restored from backup, so further increasing application downtime.